Lately I've been meeting lots of new people. Some industry and startup people, some new friends and some from other departments in Berkeley. When I tell them I'm a PhD student, they ask about the topic of my PhD. When I say "Marketing", the reaction of surprise/disappointment splits into two, depending on their PC skills. …
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How valuable is your privacy?
How much money are you paying to maintain your privacy? How much should you get to let others pry into your private information? I recently attended a talk by MIT's Catherine Tucker about the cost of privacy, from the perspective of advertisers. Prof. Tucker and her co-author checked how changes in privacy rules in Europe, …
Why the quality of coffee is important to world peace.
When often being asked by locals here why I care so much about the taste of what I drink, it's hard for me to even explain. Luckily, smarter men have provided a good answer, to be found in this week's Economist, a letter to the editor: A friendly brew SIR – You told a tale …
Continue reading "Why the quality of coffee is important to world peace."
Cheating for a better world.
Is bribing or lobbying always bad for society? Consider the following scenario: Alice and Bob are competing for a job, and Chris is interviewing them for that job. The company at which Chris works has a very special interview process, designed to forecast how much each new employee will bring in in revenues each year. …
Cappucco? No prego.
This week I will be commemorating 7 months since I moved to the bay area. Life has been mostly splendid here, with sunny days, polite people, mostly-functional public services system (10 months to pass a budget? Com'on), and very bad coffee. Coffee here is so ridiculously bad that I actually thought about starting to prepare …
Rak Hayom! Rak Hayom!
Yes – I did disappear, and No – nothing bad has happened to me. I am alive, and kicking all sorts of equilibrium problems. According to the UC Berkeley Economics department, you have not been through a real Zubur unless you’ve been applying the implicit function theorem on anything you can, in very explicit ways. …
3,000 words.
Actually, 3 photos - Commercials I saw on SF Muni. I think the first one is hilarious, but the second and third are very close competitors as well. (Raising Venture Capital, or Raising Puppies?) Anyone care to comment on what one would look like if they would advertise Israel? I see a person switching from …
To raise, or not to raise.
(This is a long post about my views on an important issue in Israel. I apologize to those who were waiting for my witty post about being MacGyver in SF, or my guide to handling sleazy salesmen. These are yet to come). ‘Tis this time of year in Israel, when the air cools (we wish), …
Sort of an update.
It's been a month and 10 days since I moved to the bay area. Many people (more than 3, at least) asked me how things were going, so I decided to tell how things were going in a well organized matter. To put it in other words - there's going to be a list following: …
Simon Signs
I bet there’s someone here in California called Simon who has the best job on earth – he gets to print out signs with stupid rules that everyone has to adhere to, but no one is sure why.Instead of playing Simon Says, he just laughs in his small office and prints a sign saying “House …